''Why would anyone want to see a movie about a crazy, middle-aged dame?'

Since his death in 1989, Gena Rowlands has been notoriously reluctant to discuss the work of her husband, John Cassavetes. To mark a new retrospective of his films, she makes an exception for Duncan Campbell

It's hard to imagine two of Hollywood's most admired actors running into trouble with the police for slapping up posters of their latest film in the middle of the night. But that was the only way that John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands could rustle up interest in the films that were shunned by the mainstream industry.

John Cassavetes died in 1989 at the age of 59, still battling to get his films shown because he was still the maverick, edgy director whose work people either loved and treasured as part of the canon of great American cinema or hated and mocked as self-indulgent ramblings. Now the National Film Theatre is screening all of his films, from the very first, Shadows, made for next to nothing in 1961, through his best-known work such as the award-winning A Woman Under the Influence in 1974 and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie in 1976. A new generation who may never have had a chance to see his work on a cinema screen will now be able to judge for themselves.

Posters for two of his films, Gloria and Love Streams, hang on either side of the log fire in the home he shared with Gena Rowlands high in the Hollywood Hills, a home that doubled as their studio. Other posters, small works of art in themselves, frame the door to the sitting room where Rowlands is talking about her late husband's work. "These were in John's office when he died and I was going to put them in storage and then I thought no - heck, that's our whole life there - I'm going to put it up so I can be reminded of it. Looks dangerously like Sunset Boulevard..."

When people mention Cassavetes's work they refer to him mainly as the great improviser, a misconception with which Gena Rowlands is familiar. "Many people feel that all of John's scripts were improvised and that just isn't true. There are a lot of different opinions of what improvisation means - a lot of people think it means you just say anything you want to, whereas usually it's based on a storyline: you know what the thrust of the scene is, then it's rehearsed and turned into something. That is the way they worked in Shadows. When John screened it for the first time he didn't like part of it so he went back and shot some more. I think he would have kept reshooting and editing for the rest of his life!"

A Woman Under the Influence, widely regarded as Cassavetes' finest film, won an Oscar nomination for him as best director and for Rowlands for her haunting portrayal of a woman on the very edge. "That was totally scripted. John had written it as a play - he wrote two plays and they were both wonderful - but I said: 'John, I would be dead in two weeks if I played this on stage every night.' So he said: 'I'll put it into a movie.' And that's what he did." But while the cast may have been working from a script, there was always room for their own improvisations, whether it was Seymour Cassel riffing in Faces (1968) or Ben Gazzara, Peter Falk and Cassavetes rambling drunkenly in Husbands (1970). So how did the actors feel about working in that way? "Peter [Falk, along with Rowlands, Cassel and Gazzara, part of the loyal Cassavetes ensemble] was a little hesitant at the beginning. Peter used to say: 'I dunno, I don't know what he's talking about.' Then he saw the results and he became a believer."

Esme Chandlee, who has worked as a publicist with Rowlands and Cassavetes since the early days, is sitting in on the interview on this oddly grey LA afternoon. She recalls that Joan Blondell, one of the great names of old Hollywood who played a playwright in Opening Night not long before she died, was also initially puzzled by Cassavetes' way of working. "She had been brought up in the studio system and she said: 'You know, Esme, I have never worked this way before. I don't know if I'm doing the right thing.' I said: 'Whatever you feel is right, just talk to John about it and that will be that.' About a week later, she said: 'I feel so free, everything I ask him, he listens. I never had an experience like this.'"

"It takes a while to get used to freedom," says Rowlands, who was a successful actress before participating in her husband's films. Cassavetes had made his name play ing the title role in the television detective series Johnny Staccato and went on to act in nearly 30 films including Rosemary's Baby and The Dirty Dozen, mainly to finance his own movies. "My idea of the future was of us acting together like the Lunts [America's most famous theatrical couple, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne]. It took me by surprise when he became interested in directing and writing, but once he had started, he didn't have the interest in acting he had had before; he looked at it simply as a way to make money so we could make our films."

But she believes that his own experience as an actor made him receptive to the feelings of other actors. "If an actor said, 'I'd like another take,' he'd say 'Sure,' because anything the actors wanted he would do. And I think part of the reason that people think of everything as improvised is that the actor was predominant. That's not the case on most pictures. There were no marks on the floor and we wore battery microphones so that we could move around. They were at their early stages, they weren't very convenient and sometimes you lost a bit of quality of sound, but we reckoned it was worth it for the freedom they gave us.

"You never stopped a take, whatever happened. If you dropped something, you would just carry on. Having that freedom added to the improvisatory reputation. And John wrote his scripts not as people should speak but as people do speak - street talk, general conversation - it gave such a natural feeling to the film that people thought they were improvised." He also took advice from his actors, asking their opinions as the dailies or rushes were shown, crowded events at which even the person cleaning the editing studio would be asked for his view.

After the critical success of Shadows, Cassavetes was invited into the studio system and made two films, Too Late Blues (1961), about a jazz musician, and the drama A Child is Waiting (1963), about kids with learning difficulties. Neither were successful and he returned to independent film-making.

"He had written Too Late Blues for Monty - Montgomery Clift - and Paramount said, 'Absolutely not, you must be out of your mind,' so they recast it with Bobby Darin. He did a very lovely job but suddenly things were taken away from you that you thought were yours. John was intrigued with all of the equipment [while working for the studios] but he was not used to the custom they have out here of people praising you and saying, 'Yes, yes,' and then taking the picture away from you. He got in a fight with Stanley Kramer [the legendary producer-director who died last week] because Stanley had taken the film [A Child is Waitin] and re-cut it and not told him. I don't think John had any idea that anyone had anything to say about a cut except the director. We were that innocent."

The return to the independent world meant the inevitable return to the problems of financing. "It was impossible to raise money outside the studio. We totally financed all the films ourselves except for A Woman Under the Influence, for which Peter Falk and his wife paid half. After John had done the screenplay for it, everyone said: 'Why does anyone want to see a picture about a crazy middle-aged dame?' But we were luckier than a lot of young directors now because we were both established actors and when we ran out of money, which was all the time, we would stop and each make a movie. It's harder for young writers and directors now, unless they are very wealthy, because whoever puts up the money always has a lot to say."

Rowlands insists that, despite his outsider nature, Cassavetes was not interested in politics, yet he is often perceived to have reflected the views of the early feminist movement. I cite the lines of Lynn Carlin, the embattled wife in Faces: "I've got lots to say - you want to try me." But as Rowlands responds: "You hear both sides - many feminists attack him. He had a great interest in women and a great sympathy for them. His opinion was that society made women quite crazy - and not just the men. It was their mothers making them crazy half of the time. He said men got all the blame but their mothers told them which way to act and to pretend things that they didn't feel and say things they didn't mean, to inflate a man's ego . . . I just thought he saw through a lot of games.

"He had an insatiable curiosity and compassion for just regular people, very often working-class people or artists or women. In Faces, there were older women who expressed their desires and frustrations and that was just not seen at the time. It was considered embarrassing for an older woman to have anything to say about anything emotional."

So difficult was the business of distribution that one night Cassavetes went to a late-night newsstand and bought all the out-of-town papers, from St Louis and Toronto and Chicago, to see which cinemas were playing the sort of films they liked; he would then ring them and ask if they would take his movies. Sometimes it even worked.

"John was totally fearless, almost unnaturally so. I never saw him depressed, I saw him angry, which they say is the other side of depression, but he was very sure and not particularly influenced by anything anybody said. Our pictures made people feel very uncomfortable much of the time. The characters were very emotionally exposed and people weren't used to it. Everything was not spelled out. The old tradition was that you prepared the audience but with our films you had to just sit there and hold on to your seats. Some people like that and some don't."

Cassavetes was often called the "European American" director because his work seemed similar to some of the new wave cinema of the period in Europe. His own taste in films and directors incorporated American masters such as John Ford, Orson Welles and Frank Capra. Rowlands remembers that he once said: "Maybe there wasn't an America, maybe there was just Frank Capra." He also admired closer contemporaries like Martin Scorsese, who often praises Cassavetes' work. When Rowlands and Cassavetes first met as students at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, he admired Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica.

So which of his own films was he proudest of? "When he was ill, we were talking one day and he said: 'Well, I made three pictures I would live or die for.' Now wouldn't you think that I would say: 'Which pictures were those, John?' But I felt I knew. Now I don't know and I can't say for certain because I don't want to speak for John." She hopes that A Woman Under the Influence was one and suspects that Faces and his first, Shadows, may have been the others. Their last film together was Love Streams in 1984: "Jon Voight was supposed to do it but at the last minute he couldn't - one of those commitment things - and John said: 'Oh, hell, I'll do it.' I'm so glad that he did, not that I don't love Jon Voight, but because that was our last picture together."

Does she ever watch the films she made with Cassavetes? " I don't really have to - when I want to, in my mind, I can roll them from the first frame right to the very end."

The John Cassavetes season runs at the National Film Theatre, London SE1 (020-7928 3232), until March 30.